"Donkerbroek: Tsjusterboksem, 1998–2026". Group exhibition, SIGN, Groningen. 2026.
Tsjusterboksem, 1998-2026
The project began with a question that has followed me throughout my practice: what happens when a sculpture is finished, and what could this mean?Finishing a sculpture always felt discomforting. The work would lose something essential that had been present throughout its creation. It was as if I had given birth to an entity, only to rob it of its existence the moment it was complete.
A finished sculpture became a dead sculpture.
The answer came while following an intuition: placing my sculptures into water and watching them implode. I had spent years experimenting with materials, locations, and even descriptions, but it was only through this process that I realised what I had actually been searching for.
I was searching for movement. Not a depiction of movement, but lived movement. Whether a sculpture can ever truly be finished matters little to me. The question itself is as ambiguous as asking, "What is art?". It is an enjoyable question to contemplate, but a less interesting one to answer. As the sculptures disintegrated, the constant transformation of form, expression, and interpretation that had existed throughout their making returned. The sculpture became alive again. It was no longer locked in a frozen state of being.
As I wrote in my graduation thesis:
"The clay woman had come alive. She was no longer forced to stare into a nonexistent future. She opposed the conditions into which she had been born. She had become temporarily alive and made me question my own being. It was no longer a one-person show. Like the sculpture, I wanted my own face to crumble as well—to gain the same cracks appearing in the clay, and witness my face become an eroding landscape of a life lived."
Denying transformation is to live with one eye closed.
While working on a commission for Vanity Box's album Sudden Loud Sounds in a Capital City, I realised I had long wanted to make a work about Donkerbroek. Unofficially translated into Frisian as Tsjusterboksem, the village has often struck me as a place where time stands still.
But when recording its ambience and documenting its architecture revealed something else entirely.
Beneath the appearance of permanence, historical changes, social changes, and forgotten changes had continually unfolded. Perhaps nothing ever truly stands still. And fortunately so, otherwise, life itself would become fixed into a single state. We simply become accustomed to looking with one eye closed.